by David Beers
Right now, he had two bodies attached to the rings and two more waiting in his car.
Jeffrey Dillan, and the woman who decided living with him would be a good idea, hung above Matthew. They had been hanging for the past two years, and looked nothing like the people he originally brought in here. Those people had been lean, fit, hair trimmed, alert. The people before him could barely be identified as human.
Their hair had passed far beyond their shoulders. Dillan’s beard continued to grow, reaching his collarbone now. The once fit muscles were all flab, looking like they were melting from the bones. Their hands were splayed out to the side, their feet lay one over the other, mimicking Christ on the cross. Matthew had designed it that way on purpose. It lent itself for a nice bit of irony, he thought. Metal poles connecting back to the ring passed through each of their hands, another through their feet.
Matthew walked over to Jeffrey Dillan, suspended ten feet in the air, his body naked. Two wires sprang from the pupils of his eyes and into the bolts drilled through his hands. The same for his girlfriend that hung beside him. A large tube ran from each of their mouths, down the outside of their bodies and across the floor to a giant barrel. Liquid food was pumped from the barrel once a day, containing all the nutrients that these two—as well as the two in the car—would ever need. The food supply was self-generating, pretty much. Like a compost pile, but one for humans rather than plants.
Jeffrey was still alive, which Matthew enjoyed almost as much as anything else. Everyone that hung on these giant rings would be alive for as long as it took to fill this light-tower. Right now, Jeffrey felt the pain of wires feeding through his eyeballs and into the soft tissue of his brain beneath. When food came through the tubes, filling up his esophagus, and spilling over his mouth because he couldn’t swallow fast enough, he knew it.
Jeffrey deserved it. Matthew had heard Hilman’s voice. He had heard it for the briefest of seconds and then everything had been shattered. Everything he worked twenty years for, everything he had come so close to capturing, had been stolen from him. They destroyed his mind, and then his body. Dillan made that possible, because Dillan’s lust for money allowed him to tail Matthew for months, allowed him to understand everything about the operation Matthew amassed.
At the end, though, Dillan lost his nerve and ratted.
Matthew heard Hilman’s voice and then heard it no more. All because of the man hanging before him. So, yes, Dillan deserved it. He deserved to hang here until his skin rotted from his bones and only a skeleton remained. Unfortunately, Matthew wouldn’t be able to give him what he deserved, because there wasn’t enough time for that.
He had a lot of work to do tonight, hanging up the woman and child that were in the van outside wouldn’t be easy. Tomorrow, he had his coming out party, as he thought of it. The time for thought was over, at least for tonight.
It was now time for action.
“I only spoke with Agent Moore once besides the brief words I said before taking her. Kind of a, ‘hey, nice to see you thing’. I thought that I might speak to you a bit more. We’re going to be in this together, I think, but I’m not running away this time. I’m not searching for any of your law enforcement friends, so the chances of us ever actually meeting face to face is nil. And thus, I thought I’d give you a call. You can run the trace, but the analysts aren’t going to track anything. Do the cops in Texas have that kind of sophistication anyway? I doubt it, but I’ll wait if you need to plug your cellphone up to anything.”
All Art said was hello, and he had been answered with an almost stream of conscious one-way conversation.
“Who is this?” He asked, his cellphone still against his ear.
“My body is Arthur Morgant’s, the same one the cops you’re with probably fingerprinted from Moore’s house. My mind is who I’ve always been though, Matthew Brand.”
Art tried to swallow although his mouth had suddenly filled with cotton balls.
“How did you get my number?” Art asked.
“I looked it up online. I’ve worked on projects a lot harder than the ability to look up strangers’ phone numbers, Art.”
Art stood up and rushed across the room to Jake’s desk. He tapped the younger man on the shoulder and started pointing at his phone.
It’s him, he mouthed.
“Art, take your time. I’m in no rush. Get your people involved; I’ll be here.”
Fuck it then, Art thought. “It’s him. Brand, he’s on my phone. Can you guys track this?”
Jake bolted up from his chair. “Umm...no, not under this short notice.” He looked around for a second and then grabbed a notepad and pen. “Put it on speakerphone.” He sat back down and started typing into his computer, hammering out words, suddenly blind to everything else around him. “I’m going to try to get someone in here to trace it, and I’m going to contact your cellphone provider. Who do you have?”
Art held the phone a few inches from his ear. “Verizon,” he said, not understanding at all what the kid was doing.
“Hey, somebody get over here!” Jake shouted into the air, his fingers nearly breaking the sound barrier as he hammered on the keyboard. “You two,” he said at the cops walking over. “Take down every bit of the conversation that is about to happen. Every bit. Pens and paper right there,” he said, nodding to his desk.
“Sounds like everything is good on your end, Art. Ready to talk?”
Art looked around the police station. Twenty or thirty people in here and only three of them over at this desk ready to listen to what might be the most important professional conversation any of them ever heard. Or maybe it was bullshit. Just because someone said they were Matthew Brand didn’t make it so. For Art, he wasn’t comfortable with this. He wasn’t a negotiator. He wasn’t from Texas. He wasn’t a field operator anymore. Hadn’t been for fifteen years. He managed field operations. He developed strategy. He didn’t talk to psychos on phones and try to decipher what they meant. And here was this twenty-something computer geek, apparently, taking charge as if he’d been waiting for the call. Jake still hadn’t looked up from the screen as he frantically tried to get someone here who could install tracking software. The other two cops were looking at him now, waiting on him to do something, and he felt like he didn’t exactly know what to do. Talk to this guy? Talk to the man with the deep voice who claimed to have the mental state of the smartest man to ever live?
“How do I know you are who you say you are?” Art asked. He turned the speaker on and laid his phone on the desk.
“Well. That’s a good question. I guess I hadn’t really figured you might think someone else took Moore, but it makes sense. Did you ever check out the crime scene notes or photos from Dillan’s disappearance?”
Art had. He’d looked at them for hours, had considered even flying to California to look at the house himself. “Yeah,” Art answered.
“His tongue was in the sink. The kitchen sink. No papers spoke about that. No Fox News’ report mentioned it. I cut it out for obvious reasons.”
Art remembered the piece of meat sitting on the white basin, surrounded by blood and looking like some kind of small, dead, sea animal. The cops managed to keep that piece of the whole crime quiet, but... “Something else. That wasn’t the only thing not allowed out to the public.”
“I can’t tell if you really don’t believe me or actually think you might be able to get a trace on my location if you keep me talking long enough. Either is fine. You got a piece of my shoe print in the house. It was from the woman’s blood, when I dragged her in from the balcony where she had been tanning. Her nose was bleeding and I stepped in it, the right edge of my right foot. It wouldn’t be enough to identify my size, but you could definitely see the tracks. I remember looking at it but decided against wiping anything down because I knew no one would be seeing me for a while.”
Art saw the photo in his mind. They had tried to determine the type of shoe, but it was a dead end.
“At the very least,
you have to know I’m the one that took Jeffrey Dillan. You can believe I’m Matthew Brand or someone else if you want, and you can question whether or not I took Moore, but you must believe that I took Dillan.”
Art looked at the two men scribbling on their pads of paper. Neither of them looked up or took a second to pause. Jake was staring at the phone, listening. Art noticed other people had gathered around. Everyone in the room was slowly migrating over to watch Art Brayden talk with the supposed perpetrator, and Art had no clue what to say. No idea what this conversation was about. No idea what to do at all. A man with thirty years of law enforcement experience and somehow he lost it all in the five minutes he’d been on the phone.
“Where’s Moore?” He asked.
“She’s with me. Or, rather, I know where she is. You needn’t worry about her. You won’t be getting her back, and if you did, her days of taking care of her daughter, or her daughter needing to be taken care of for that matter, are over. She’s in God’s hands now. Do you believe in God, Art?”
“I was baptized Catholic.”
“When was the last time you took communion?”
“At mass this past Sunday.”
“A true believer then!” Matthew shouted. “I think God is going to sit this one out, though, Art. To stop me, it would take a real intervention, I can tell you that.”
“Stop you from doing what?”
“You were there when I died, weren’t you? You and Moore?”
“Yes.”
“You heard my son speak then, didn’t you? You heard him ask me what was going on?”
Art closed his eyes. He didn’t like thinking about that part. They had saved a young girl and ended a madman’s killing spree. And at the same time, they had killed what sounded like a young man, someone who had no idea where he was or what was going on. They had killed him by destroying the glass house he was born into.
“I heard him,” Art said.
“I can’t remember his voice, because that body and mind died. I had to read about it in Dillan’s book, unfortunately. However, I’m glad you told the truth; I’d hate to hear a man of God lie. Art, I’ve given up my chase for Hilman. I’ve realized that no matter what I do, you, your world, won’t let me have him back. You’ll fight me at every turn. You’ve taken everything in this world I had. My career. My son. My wife. My own body. I lost that battle and it took me being reborn into this body to understand. I get it now and I’m at peace. I’m not here for my son any longer. I’m here for the world, Art. I’m here to end all of your lives as you so effectively ended mine.”
Art paused and seconds passed. He found Jake’s eyes, and the kid was squinting, not fully in the present, but somewhere inside his own head.
“You’re going to kill everyone in the world. That’s what you’re saying?”
“Exactly. You. The cops next to you. The people farming rice patties in North Korea. They’re all going to die over the next couple of months.”
“You planning on purchasing a few nukes? Terrorists have been trying that for years; we have some pretty sophisticated ways of stopping them.”
Matthew laughed. “Moore thought a lot differently than you, didn’t she? I don’t think you’re dumb, per se, maybe just too old to be involved in this. I won’t be using nukes, Art.”
“Enough with the bullshit. What do you want?” Art asked, his temper finally igniting. The man on the other end of this phone—Morgant, Brand, or some other psycho—was fucking around. He was saying shit just to say it, and none of it led anywhere. The guy was getting off on this, and Art stood here with his hand on the man’s dick, just jacking him off.
“I want you to tell the world what’s coming. That’s all. Will you do that for me?”
“And what is coming? Because all I can see is that I’m going to catch you if you are who you say you are.”
Matthew chuckled. “Would I call you if I thought there was even the remotest chance of that? It doesn’t matter. Hear me out, and when I’m done, I want you to tell the world what I’ve told you, okay? I imagine within three months, there won’t be a single living thing on this planet. I may be overstating my case, because there might be some life in the bottom of the oceans or underneath the Earth’s surface, but not much more than that. I’m going to kill the sun, Art. Do you know how much energy rests inside a human body? Seventy trillion suns’ worth. All of it tied up inside our atoms, most of the time unable to be released. I’m going to release it though, Art, and not just the energy in one body, but the energy in fifty-five bodies. I’m going to fire all of that energy directly at the sun, and then, I’m going to watch as it explodes. It may burn us out in a sort of supernovae explosion, or it may simply die, leaving a black mass floating in space. I’m hoping it’s the black mass route, and I think it will be. That way humanity sits here for a few weeks in complete darkness, before they rot away. If it’s a supernovae type thing, that’ll be fine too. Everyone will feel a good bit of pain before life ends here. Do you understand what I’m saying, what I want you to communicate? I’m going to end the sun and that’s going to end life here on Earth. Can you get that to some news stations or maybe up on a website somewhere?”
Art stared at the phone lying on the desk. The two men with pens in their hands had stopped writing. Art didn’t look up to see what Jake was doing.
He didn’t believe any of it. Not just the destruction of the sun, but the fact that someone was sitting here telling him they could accomplish such a feat, and expecting him to go along.
Art laughed. He put his hands on the desk, leaned over the phone, closed his eyes, and just laughed.
“No, motherfucker. I’m not putting that up on any website. Not because I don’t want to do your bidding, but because I’m not going to lose my job over some farce. You may have taken Moore, you may have taken Dillan, but that’s all you can do, Brand. Hell, you may be able to bring your son back, and ya know what? It seems like you have the amount of people needed to do it if my math is right. So all the power to you there. But what you can’t do is stop the sun from shining. So quit with the bullshit.”
Art listened as a sigh came through the phone. “How many times do I have to show you people? Why make this so hard?” He paused and no one on Art’s side said anything. “Fine. Since you’re a believer in The Christ, I’m going to do something for you until you do what I’m asking—I’m going to crucify someone publicly every day until my story is run nationally, that I’m going to end the world. You there, Art? I want to make sure you hear this. A crucifixion a day until you wise up. Talk soon.”
The phone went dead.
5
A crucifix was harder to make than Matthew originally thought. He had been able to build a machine which basically crushed human atoms and then directed them as a weapon into space, but here he was, trying to keep these two boards from swiveling around on one another. He finally put four more nails through the top board and that kept it from moving. Even so, he wished he had promised to do something else.
The woman lay across the board now, dead. He’d taken a simple drill bit and went through her skull into her brain. The pain was pretty excruciating for her at first, but ended quickly. He couldn’t use a gun, because she needed to look as whole as possible for the greatest effect. So he used the drill, placing the woman’s head in a vice and simply bearing down until the swirling piece of metal sank into her brain.
Matthew grabbed a nail, or rather, Matthew’s relatively new, strong, black hands grabbed a nail. He placed it in the center of her hand and gently began sinking it into her flesh with tiny swings of his hammer.
Without a doubt, this was a waste of time. He needed to be hanging bodies inside the lighthouse, not hanging them on crosses so he could decorate the city.
His plan involved murder, involved inflicting his own pain back on the world. That was only part of it though, because he wanted the people of Earth to understand a few other things. The first was fear. He wanted the entire world to wait, knowing t
hey could do nothing, hoping that if they hugged their loved ones they could stop it, thinking about their entire species' impending doom. He also wanted the world to know that he was doing it. When the sun stopped burning and darkness descended across the entire world, he didn’t want a single person on this rock to wonder why. They needed to understand that he had done it, and the reason he had done it was because they took everything else from him. They gave him nothing, had effectively banded together as one society to say that Matthew Brand and everything he wanted did not matter. Hell, they even put him in a freezer for ten years just in case they needed his brain. They had no need for Matthew the person, though. That was clear. So they denied him his son and took his wife as well, and now they would know what came from that. He would take all of their wives and sons. He would take their grandkids and everyone they held dear. Their pets. Their walks in the park. He was going to steal all of their lives and all of the lives of the unborn.
For them to know that this was his plan—that when the sun stopped shining, he had done it—he needed officials to make an announcement. Matthew knew that part would be hard; no one simply gave terrorists what they wanted. So, he needed to show them that if they didn’t do what he said, there would be a different kind of terror on their hands. He was only taking women, and they would hang from wooden boards all around the city until Art Brayden and his boss decided to listen. Matthew would do it once a day for the next two weeks, and if they hadn’t done their part by then, he would receive his first shipment of people to hang up in his lighthouse, and then he would start back with the crucifixes.
There were two rules to this game: the world would end, and the world would know he ended it.
Matthew was a simple man.
The sun rose over the buildings in downtown Boston as it had every morning for the past two hundred years. It rose, chasing away the darkness and trying its best to chase away some of the cold.
